In 1993, I moved to Groningen and rented a small apartment at Kraaienest in Lewenborg, a multicultural neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. The quarter featured a few large apartment blocks mixed with family homes. When I told others that I lived there, some of them felt sorry for me. The area had a questionable reputation, but that was grossly exaggerated, mainly by those who didn’t live there. I had lived there for four years and never felt unsafe. But if you look for ‘Kraaienest Groningen’ in a search engine, you will find that someone died there in 2014 as a result of a ‘violent incident.’

There was drug dealing going on in the area, or so I had heard. I wandered around quite often, but never noticed it, probably because I didn’t know where to go. For the most part, it was an ordinary neighbourhood. I only knew my next-door neighbours vaguely. You could raise your children there, and there were families with children, but if you had better options, you would go somewhere else.

A group of about thirty black males with dreadlocks often hung out near the shopping mall, in what the Dutch call a coffee shop, but which was, despite the name, a place to buy and smoke cannabis. At first glance, they seemed intimidating because there were so many, but as far as I could see, they did nothing more than hang around and smoke weed. If you passed by, they were friendly. ‘Live and let live,’ was the Dutch stance on cannabis, which was officially banned, but no enforcement of that ban was the official policy of ‘tolerance’ concerning the less harmful soft drugs.

As a teenager, I had imagined there would one day be a giant Rasta party in Nijverdal, likely because the river passing through Nijverdal is named Regge, which sounds like reggae. The party would be on the banks of the river, and the Rastafari from all over the world would come to Nijverdal. In hindsight, this is a coincidence worth noting. Rasta(fari) is an Abrahamic messianic religion like Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Rastafarians see Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, as a reincarnation of Jesus. Significant dates in the Rastafarian religion are 11 September (9/11 American notation), the Ethiopian New Year and 2 November (11/2 American notation), referring to emergency services numbers of the United States and the European Union. And there, they were hanging around in droves, near my home.

I had a job and, more importantly, a place of my own, so I wasn’t very particular about the place where I lived. Life had turned for the better. It was not marvellous, but then again, not as bad as it had been for a long time. And if your life turns from miserable to not-so-great, you can be content. I went out often alone, secretly hoping for the love that might come while dancing all night to rock music,

Sometimes I feel
Like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel
Like my only friend
Is the city I live in
…
I don’t ever want to feel
Like I did that day

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under The Bridge

The day was 13 October 1989 when I left the dormitory. The city was Groningen, where I lived alone and without a partner. I started collecting Garfield comics, about a cat well-known for its fatness and cynicism. Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, was an out-of-style country guy like me who had ended up in a city without a love life. Jon Arbuckle. That was the kind of guy I could relate to. And I didn’t even have a cat.

Women have become economically independent, and men, on average, crave women more, or perhaps sex, than women desire men, so more men than women end up involuntarily single. And women can be more picky because they don’t need a man to provide for them. Feminism solved a few problems but also created new ones. And men don’t talk about their problems, so women’s issues get the most attention.

Once, I met a lady in Groningen. She had travelled a lot and seen much of the world, whereas I hadn’t. She immediately concluded, and these were her exact words, ‘I hadn’t much to offer her.’ I was a provincial, and there was no point in getting to know me. Women often had long lists of requirements a man should meet. Men also have their wishes. They want hot supermodels, even if they’re not rich or good-looking.

Some of my friends never found a wife. They would have made good husbands, better than the jerks many women select. But they weren’t particularly adventurous or glamorous. Every market has winners and losers, as does the market for spouses. Once, in a pub, an Asian woman approached me out of the blue. She asked me if I was willing to die for her. My reply was frank, ‘No.’ I wasn’t that desperate. And so, she moved on. In hindsight, the incident was yet another noteworthy coincidence.

It turned me off. What was wrong with women? Did they think that men merely exist to please them? Of course, not all women were like that, but those still on the market often were so due to their excessive requirement lists. And women had only brought me misery with nothing good to show for it. Women weren’t worth the effort. Let’s face it. I was gradually giving up on them, and apathy was setting in.

A friend from my student years came over to Groningen. We went to a pub with a dance floor. A short but muscular man suddenly demanded that I leave. He seemed angry. In hindsight, I probably hit his face with my elbow while dancing as he was close behind me, but I was unaware of that and didn’t know there was a problem. I also didn’t recognise him as the pub’s bouncer, so I continued dancing. He then gave me a terrible beating and threw me out of the pub, severely injuring me so that I couldn’t work for two weeks. I filed a report with the police. I didn’t hear from them, so after a week, I called.

The police officer responsible for the case wasn’t in, so the police asked me to call again later. That happened a few times until, after a month, I managed to get hold of him. They weren’t going to do anything. It was a low-priority matter. And he began lecturing about police priorities. Justice was served nonetheless. About six months later, a local newspaper mentioned that the police had apprehended the guy for beating up an immigrant for no reason. It became treated as a case of racism, and at the time, racism had a high priority with the police.

Princess had moved to London in the United Kingdom and came to Groningen to visit me. She came by bus to the central station. I showed her Groningen, and we went out to the pubs. We also went by train to Amsterdam. On our way back, she expressed her disappointment that we hadn’t visited the world-famous red light district, which foreigners seem to want to see for some reason. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted to go there. Groningen also had such an area, and the lights there were as red, so Princess didn’t have to miss out on the action. When we walked down that particular street everyone in Groningen knew about, she said, ‘Look! That hooker is cursing me because I walk here with you!’ I didn’t notice it, but that is what Princess supposedly saw.

We also visited Nijverdal. I had hoped to surprise my mother, but she wasn’t at home. From there, we went to Enschede. I showed Princess the university campus. We also went to the German border close to Enschede at Glanerbrug. At the frontier, Princess attracted the attention of some locals in a pub. When Princess went to the toilet, one of them came after her and offered her money for sex. It was at least one hundred guilders, as Princess described his offer as a pile of banknotes with a one-hundred-guilder note on top. And the guy became pushy, even though not threatening. He offered to bring us to Enschede, or wherever we wanted to go, in his car several times. We had come to Enschede by train and, from there, by bus to Glanerbrug.

Princess didn’t see any problem with stepping into his car. She was sturdy enough to handle the guy, but I smelled trouble and insisted on taking the next bus out. She was genuinely surprised. On the bus back to Enschede, she asked me, ‘Why do you allow me to chat with guys in the pubs in Groningen but don’t allow him to bring us back?’ Princess seemed to think I was possessive. I said to her, ‘He is an asshole.’ Then she suddenly turned thankful for me being protective. And it dawned upon her that the whole situation wasn’t quite right. That showed the conditions of the ghetto where she had grown up. She later married a German guy. We later changed addresses and lost contact by 1997. Around 2013, she found me on LinkedIn and contacted me again. She worked for the US Army in Germany and was still married to him. They had a son together.

In 1994, I received an invitation to a singles party on a boat in Amsterdam. They had invited me because I had put in a personal advertisement the year before. On my way there on the train, I accidentally bumped into two guys from Almelo who were also going there. Nijverdal is close to Almelo, so we came from the same region, Twente. That created a bond and a mutual understanding. The guys from Almelo were discussing the disappointment they were about to get. One of them said, ‘The great thing about these events is the anticipation.’

After a decade of disappointments, there was hardly any anticipation on my part. And the previous five years had counted as twenty. When I moved to the university campus, I was twenty but immature, like a fifteen-year-old boy. Five years later, I had grown mature like a thirty-five-year-old. The intense memories still hung over me like a shadow. A clear division had emerged between life before and life after meeting A******* in the dormitory. These were two entirely different lives. When in Enschede, I sometimes returned to the campus to take a walk in the nearby forest and think about all that had happened.

Featured image: Kombuisflat in Lewenborg. H. de Vegt (2005). CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.